Amazon has announced plans to offer customers digital copies of books they have purchased for free or discounted prices.

Named Kindle MatchBook, the scheme will apply retroactively to
books purchased from 1995 onwards – the year Amazon opened its first online
store.

More expensive titles will cost $2.99 for their ebook equivalent, though
Amazon says other price options will be “$1.99, $0.99, or free”. The ebooks will be available exclusively for "the Amazon ecosystem of digital content", meaning they will only work for Kindle owners.

Over 10,000 books will be available from MatchBook’s launch
in October, with books launched from the likes of Ray Bradbury, Michael
Crichton, Neil Gaiman, Jodi Picoult, and Neal Stephenson. This
is far from comprehensive coverage, considering the hundreds of thousands of
titles that Amazon stocks.

“In addition to being a great new benefit for customers,
this is an easy choice for publishers and authors who will now be able to earn
more from each book they publish,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President
of Kindle Content.

The success of the scheme will depend upon copyright holders
agreeing to Amazon’s terms, and the e-commerce giant say their announcement of
the scheme is also “a call to all authors and publishers to enroll their books
in Kindle MatchBook—offering customers great value while adding a new revenue
stream.”

The scheme is similar to the company’s AutoRip service
launched in January this year, followed by a June launch in Europe. This
allowed customers to scan back through CDs they had purchased from Amazon and
download MP3 versions of the tracks.